World of Whorecraft: Battle for Asseroth

[Angthoron]

CC

Well, that's just the thing, the way CC is used now is completely different from how it used to be handled then. Back then, dungeons had, like you said, massive amounts of mobs that you had to carefully navigate, CC, slow, disable, just to make sure a runner wouldn't go off and bring half the dungeon with it. BRD and BRS in particular come to mind, but hell, even an early Deadmines run would show that you WERE supposed to be paying attention unless you wanted to be ganked by patrols, runner-adds and general inability to handle everything that's going on. Today, you're going to CC that one or two mobs that are going to channel something huge or otherwise be a gigantic solitary pain in the ass, thus bringing a potentially challenging encounter back to a tank/spank combination of complexity.

It won't matter how many abilities and scripts the trash (or bosses) will have, when all you need is tank, spank and mild situational awareness. If you're any good at all, there's essentially no room for "oh shit" moments that made the game fun before, and certainly no chances for one person to shine and save the day by being really fucking ahead of the curve. The only way you're ahead of the curve is your DPS/Heal meters. Woo. No chance for a tank to show that they've learned something cool from raids, no need to show that a healer has split-second reaction time and excellent decision-making, no need for DPS to go from restraint to mad-burst-DPS for that special moment your friend got feared and brought in eight hundred friends more.

Alright, raiding is different, but we're talking dungeons, not raids. And "dungeons are supposed to be casual" is a lame excuse, casual entry content only breeds a further more casual audience, anyway. Seeing that in my own raid group recruit pool.

 

[J1M]

Another huge problem with the modern dungeon is their use within the context of daily valor point gain. This tends towards the design of a long hallway that can be completed in 15 minutes for maximum valor per minute.

Wailing Caverns, Lower Blackrock Spire, and Dire Maul were not designed to be run over and over and over. If you wanted to do one of those, you needed to set aside at least an hour, and exploring the place was half of the reward. You certainly ended up going to these places multiple times, but not because you were desperately looking for a specific item. You went back because the place was large and difficult and your first attempt resulted in a key that let you skip the first half of the dungeon.

 

[Keshik]

Should have normal be farm mode for valor and set heroic to be an old style of instance which will take time but net some fancier loot as well as valor, then. Also with the group finder I wonder how that will work with instances that need CC, I guess you'd have to select yourself as a CC class ( or does every class have one these days?)

 

[Angthoron]

Should have normal be farm mode for valor and set heroic to be an old style of instance which will take time but net some fancier loot as well as valor, then. Also with the group finder I wonder how that will work with instances that need CC, I guess you'd have to select yourself as a CC class ( or does every class have one these days?)

Everything pretty much has it. And I think they planned to remove JPs and only go with VPs eventually (or so I seem to recall), so that might be exactly what'll happen anyway.

 

[Keshik]

Ah, ok. Hm, kind of sucky to lose a niche but is the way with the finder.

 

[Zeriel]

Another huge problem with the modern dungeon is their use within the context of daily valor point gain. This tends towards the design of a long hallway that can be completed in 15 minutes for maximum valor per minute.

Wailing Caverns, Lower Blackrock Spire, and Dire Maul were not designed to be run over and over and over. If you wanted to do one of those, you needed to set aside at least an hour, and exploring the place was half of the reward. You certainly ended up going to these places multiple times, but not because you were desperately looking for a specific item. You went back because the place was large and difficult and your first attempt resulted in a key that let you skip the first half of the dungeon.

This shit started in Burning Crusade. Remember the very first dungeon? One short hallway punctuated with a boss fight every 10 trash packs. I remember playing through the first few dungeons of TBC when it came out, being horrified, and looking for an explanation. As it happened, Blizzard had one! They were touting their new and improved dungeon design, which was intentionally built to let casual players play the game in thirty-minute bursts. My horror changed to bitterness, because since it was intentional that meant that it would continue to be this way forever.

This is why I am intensely amused whenever someone believes the next expansion is going to reverse course--this will never happen. Everything has gone according to plan, and Blizzard considers each new expansion a drastic "improvement" on what came before.

 

[Gragt]

Ah, Blackrock Spire with the shortcuts you could take, etc. I'm pretty sure most of that stuff wasn't planned but it did make the place a lot more interesting.

 

[Ninjerk]

Another huge problem with the modern dungeon is their use within the context of daily valor point gain. This tends towards the design of a long hallway that can be completed in 15 minutes for maximum valor per minute.

Wailing Caverns, Lower Blackrock Spire, and Dire Maul were not designed to be run over and over and over. If you wanted to do one of those, you needed to set aside at least an hour, and exploring the place was half of the reward. You certainly ended up going to these places multiple times, but not because you were desperately looking for a specific item. You went back because the place was large and difficult and your first attempt resulted in a key that let you skip the first half of the dungeon.

This shit started in Burning Crusade. Remember the very first dungeon? One short hallway punctuated with a boss fight every 10 trash packs. I remember playing through the first few dungeons of TBC when it came out, being horrified, and looking for an explanation. As it happened, Blizzard had one! They were touting their new and improved dungeon design, which was intentionally built to let casual players play the game in thirty-minute bursts. My horror changed to bitterness, because since it was intentional that meant that it would continue to be this way forever.

This is why I am intensely amused whenever someone believes the next expansion is going to reverse course--this will never happen. Everything has gone according to plan, and Blizzard considers each new expansion a drastic "improvement" on what came before.

There were like 2 heroics that could be done in 30 minutes in TBC.

 

[Angthoron]

Another huge problem with the modern dungeon is their use within the context of daily valor point gain. This tends towards the design of a long hallway that can be completed in 15 minutes for maximum valor per minute.

Wailing Caverns, Lower Blackrock Spire, and Dire Maul were not designed to be run over and over and over. If you wanted to do one of those, you needed to set aside at least an hour, and exploring the place was half of the reward. You certainly ended up going to these places multiple times, but not because you were desperately looking for a specific item. You went back because the place was large and difficult and your first attempt resulted in a key that let you skip the first half of the dungeon.

This shit started in Burning Crusade. Remember the very first dungeon? One short hallway punctuated with a boss fight every 10 trash packs. I remember playing through the first few dungeons of TBC when it came out, being horrified, and looking for an explanation. As it happened, Blizzard had one! They were touting their new and improved dungeon design, which was intentionally built to let casual players play the game in thirty-minute bursts. My horror changed to bitterness, because since it was intentional that meant that it would continue to be this way forever.

This is why I am intensely amused whenever someone believes the next expansion is going to reverse course--this will never happen. Everything has gone according to plan, and Blizzard considers each new expansion a drastic "improvement" on what came before.

There were like 2 heroics that could be done in 30 minutes in TBC.

Also true, but the dungeons were noticeably more linear as well, for the large part.

 

[Xor]

The problem with the huge, nonlinear dungeons from vanilla is that most players are in awe of them for the first run, impressed for the second, tolerate them on the third, and then just bored. If they even bother running the instance again. I can count on one hand the number of times I did Uldaman, for example. What makes this problem worse is that when new players queue up for an instance, they are almost inevitably going to be matched with people who already know the instance, so they won't have time to stop and explore because the other people just want to finish. This was true even back in vanilla, although people tended to be more forgiving of new players. The other problem with huge instances is that they're hard to finish in most caases. Half the BRD groups I joined in vanilla would dissolve before getting to emperor, just because someone or other didn't have 2 hours to devote to one instance. And since trash respawns were actually a thing in vanilla it was pretty much impossible to replace them - you'd basically be starting over at that point. Combine these issues with just general fatigue from doing the same thing over and over again and it's pretty easy to hate vanilla dungeons. It's much easier to get sick of something frustrating than something mindlessly easy. My clear memories of the whelp room can attest to that.

Considering that the long hallway style dungeon is probably way easier to develop, it's not really surprising that Blizzard ditched the old style dungeon for their current model. There's no rewarding feeling of exploration your first time there, but on the other hand Blizzard can turn them out much faster and they avoid all those problems that megadungeons have. They lack character, but that's WoW in a nutshell since around halfway through TBC.

There were like 2 heroics that could be done in 30 minutes in TBC.

Most of the TBC dungeons were fairly short, but they were hard enough on heroic that they actually took time and you had to wait between pulls unless your group already vastly overgeared them.

Actually, a big part of the problem here is that Blizzard has been encouraging raiders to do heroics since late TBC, leading to dungeons being done daily by people who vastly overgear the content, creating the perception that the dungeons are easier and shorter than they actually are. If they wanted to fix this, they should either implement a higher level of difficulty for 5-mans that can only be done in raid gear and only give points towards purples on that difficulty, or just stop upgrading point vendors with each new raid tier so people actually have a motivation to gear up rather than just getting the next tier of raid gear handed to them with a modest time investment. Or ideally, do both. If Blizzard did that, I might really come back for the next expansion.

 

[Zeriel]

Personally, I don't really consider "It can be frustrating" a design issue to be solved. If anything, that's kind of the point of these discussions every time they come up. The whole point of dungeons in a classical MMO was to be a challenge that was long, and yeah, frustrating. If you just wanted to dick around and be bored you could kill mobs out in the zones or quest (in Everquest, ironically, the questing part basically wasn't valid, but you get the idea).

They were often designed with the assumption you were playing with a group of friends or people you knew to be good, not random bumfucks from the zone in which they were found. To vanilla WoW's credit, you could do pretty much every 5 man dungeon with random idiots, but when that ends horribly, that's hardly the fault of the dungeon.

That's why there's never going to be a meeting of minds or a renaissance for World of Warcraft. Blizzard is trying to cater to diametrically opposed groups, and the casuals by virtue of being larger in population are going to win that argument every single time. This being the Codex, however, I'm not required to like it.

 

[Wilian]

And of course my thread was locked because fuck sarcasm and misleading titles bullshit.

 

[Zeriel]

Never try to be clever or have an opinion or say anything interesting on the Blizzard forums. I am permanently banned over there for swearing once, even though the forums automatically filter out swear words. You can also be permanently banned for arguing with the developers, which is cool. And people wonder why these folks are out of touch.

 

[Caim]

You can also be permanently banned for arguing with the developers, which is cool. And people wonder why these folks are out of touch.

So that's where Bioware learned their damage control and interaction with customers.

 

[Angthoron]

The problem with the huge, nonlinear dungeons from vanilla is that most players are in awe of them for the first run, impressed for the second, tolerate them on the third, and then just bored. If they even bother running the instance again. I can count on one hand the number of times I did Uldaman, for example.

Uldaman was what, 37-44? Of course you wouldn't be running it a whole lot, there was simply no point for re-running it, aside from boosting friends/guildmates. And even then, unless the friend was out for XP or a specific item, you could beeline straight for the endboss and be done with it. Of course, considering there was no actual reward for completing a dungeon, people just went to kill whatever they wanted and left soon after. Same with BRD, most people usually finished around the Bar section, unless they were actually serious. Did it matter, unless people wanted some of the fairly sweet loot from the Emperor fight? Not really, there were other gear options.

What makes this problem worse is that when new players queue up for an instance, they are almost inevitably going to be matched with people who already know the instance, so they won't have time to stop and explore because the other people just want to finish.

Right now, most of the large Vanilla instances have been split into 2-3 sections. BRD is a 3-parter. A very boring one. Part 1 is basically done by queuing up, entering, killing ONE boss, skipping everything else because you can, and repeating to get the LFG bonus. Back in Vanilla that problem you mention didn't exist, because you couldn't queue up, and you could always mention that you're a BRD/BRS virgin. Some people didn't, but hey, that was their problem. I did, was explained by more experienced players, had fun, didn't finish.

My clear memories of the whelp room can attest to that.

Whelp room was only really an issue in two cases - if people wanted the optional boss, and if people lacked spatial awareness. Otherwise, you could simply avoid every single egg and not have to fight any whelps at all. If you mean the UBRS whelp room, that is. So, I dunno. Some things, like plant section of Maraudon, are much worse - no XP, no loot, and the mobs were soul-crushingly hard with all the quick respawns until you killed their source, because nature resists at L50 aren't usually a thing.

It's easier to develop and "funnel" the linear dungeons, though, yeah, so that's what Blizzard does. Funny thing, though, is that while it's easier and faster to make these, they're still hilariously few for a game that has a budget of a small country. I mean, sure, okay, let's have linear dungeons but then there ought to be a fuckton of them, right? Oh wait no, we only have like ten per expansion. Wait, what?

 

[Zeriel]

Uldaman was really weirdly structured, yeah. Some parts of it felt more like a questing zone that just happened to be taking place in a group than a boss-oriented dungeon. It's worth keeping in mind that some dungeons started as zones, and were then changed. (Uldaman I think was this way in initial concepts, and the Ahn'qiraj raid zones were entirely this way initially.)

That's one of the characteristic qualities of Everquest-style dungeons, though. They tend not to be cramped corridors with a boss at the end, but entire zones that just happen to not be in the overworld, and only seem different from a place like Tanaris or the Barrens by virtue of requiring a group.

 

[Angthoron]

I don't think Uldaman was structured at all. It could be fun, and it could be frustrating, and that largely hinged on the kind of a group that you went there with.

What's actually interesting about Uldaman, though, is that quite a few encounters in it were fairly involved for the game at that stage. AoE awareness fights, caster encounters, "hold out againsts enemy waves", at L37 those things were like "Whoa, how does this work?!"

 

[Cyberarmy]

Uldaman was really weirdly structured, yeah. Some parts of it felt more like a questing zone that just happened to be taking place in a group than a boss-oriented dungeon. It's worth keeping in mind that some dungeons started as zones, and were then changed. (Uldaman I think was this way in initial concepts, and the Ahn'qiraj raid zones were entirely this way initially.)

That's one of the characteristic qualities of Everquest-style dungeons, though. They tend not to be cramped corridors with a boss at the end, but entire zones that just happen to not be in the overworld, and only seem different from a place like Tanaris or the Barrens by virtue of requiring a group.

Just remembered my first Uldaman run as a hunter with 3 loladins and a DPS warrior. It took 5-6 hours and we couldn't able to finish it due to last boss being impossible with that group set up. None of my friends want to go there after heard this story, till we found out that enchanting trainer is in there surrounded by dozens of scorpids...
10 men Blackrock dark iron empire (depths ? forgot its name tsk tsk...) was like touristic tour mostly, lost precious hours at torch thing before the end boss. Bonus point for kiiling the princess who we needed to save for our mission goal.
Also gather a party for UBRS (took nearly 30 min to orgnize) to realize that noone had the key to enter...


While game got better mechanics wise with TBC, I always miss that "glorious" vanilla days. Old Blackrock, Maraudon,Scholo and Strat was perfect dungeons imho.

 

[Metro]

They basically just turned WoW into MMO Diablo.

 

[Cyberarmy]

And then turned Diablo into WoW

 

[DragoFireheart]

And then turned Diablo into WoW

And thus the circle is complete. Diablo is WoW and WoW is Diablo.

 

[Thane Solus]

Horrible Death and Blizzard creative bankrupcy, oh wait... that happen in 2000, death then...

 

[Great Deceiver]

Another huge problem with the modern dungeon is their use within the context of daily valor point gain. This tends towards the design of a long hallway that can be completed in 15 minutes for maximum valor per minute.

Wailing Caverns, Lower Blackrock Spire, and Dire Maul were not designed to be run over and over and over. If you wanted to do one of those, you needed to set aside at least an hour, and exploring the place was half of the reward. You certainly ended up going to these places multiple times, but not because you were desperately looking for a specific item. You went back because the place was large and difficult and your first attempt resulted in a key that let you skip the first half of the dungeon.

Tribute runs. So many of them.

 

[Wilian]

Tribute runs. So many of them.

At least tribute runs made some contextual sense and included interactivity with the mobs/enviroment that wasn't just a dull switch in the UI you toggle on or off. :p

Which is one of my main gripes with modern "dungeon" design as well. Not just the fact that they are extremely linear feel-good run throughs, but also a lot of the flavour and atmosphere stuff that was part of the earliel dungeons has been removed.

I of course talk of things like closing the gigantic gate inside Blackrock Depth to get access into the inner city areas, the chest event in the very same instance or just plain having some connection between outdoor gameplay and in-dungeon gameplay such as Dark Iron Ore having to me melted/crafted in BRD at special locations.

Almoust every single instance in vanilla had some of the more "adventurious" elements and events into them such as those, ranging from actual "toggle in correct order" puzzle at the bottom of Sunken Temple to a simple BFD event of lighting candles and battling waves of monsters to open a door.
There were some funnny little details regarding this as well, like the final door in Deadmines. You could choose to blow it open with powder you find within the corridors and attract extra guards, or you could use a rogue lockpick it open and avoid extra commodation. Stuff like that simply doesn't exist anymore and it's for the worse.

 

[Xenich]

Tribute runs. So many of them.

At least tribute runs made some contextual sense and included interactivity with the mobs/enviroment that wasn't just a dull switch in the UI you toggle on or off. :p

Which is one of my main gripes with modern "dungeon" design as well. Not just the fact that they are extremely linear feel-good run throughs, but also a lot of the flavour and atmosphere stuff that was part of the earliel dungeons has been removed.

I of course talk of things like closing the gigantic gate inside Blackrock Depth to get access into the inner city areas, the chest event in the very same instance or just plain having some connection between outdoor gameplay and in-dungeon gameplay such as Dark Iron Ore having to me melted/crafted in BRD at special locations.

Almoust every single instance in vanilla had some of the more "adventurious" elements and events into them such as those, ranging from actual "toggle in correct order" puzzle at the bottom of Sunken Temple to a simple BFD event of lighting candles and battling waves of monsters to open a door.
There were some funnny little details regarding this as well, like the final door in Deadmines. You could choose to blow it open with powder you find within the corridors and attract extra guards, or you could use a rogue lockpick it open and avoid extra commodation. Stuff like that simply doesn't exist anymore and it's for the worse.

Yep and that sort of decline flooded over into other games as well. For instance, LoTRO used to have extremely long and involved dungeon progressions to which at certain stages, you obtained keys (allowing you to return to specific areas for additional side story progressions). I loved the vanilla release of LotRO and while I did enjoy some of the tactical fights within the new Moria dungeons with the first expansion, they were as you say... mostly 15 min long hallway runs designed for constant repetition to farm tokens and this became the template, the standard, the norm for their design. That is a mimic of WoW and just about every game out there now designs their dungeons to be pathetic fast run farm token focused systems. Why anyone even plays these retarded games anymore is beyond me.